Symmetries and Ultra Dense Matter of Compact Stars
A special issue of Symmetry (ISSN 2073-8994). This special issue belongs to the section "Physics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2023) | Viewed by 22069
Special Issue Editor
Interests: theoretical nuclear; hadron physics
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Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Ultra‐dense matter, expected to be revealed in massive compact stars in ongoing astrophysical measurements, in tandem with the terrestrial laboratories to come, is becoming an exciting area of research in physics. It encompasses the wide‐ranging areas of physics, gravity, nuclear, particle and condensed matters. With the advent of gravity‐wave detections, ongoing measurements from both space and terrestrial laboratories are poised to give precision results in various relations involving the equation of state (EoS) of the ultra‐dense matter necessary for mapping the structure of the core of the stars. How to reliably access the massive stars, the densest matter observable in the universe, presently remains a wide‐open issue. This is because even if one takes for granted that gravity is extremely well understood—which, of course, is still far from an unquestionably acceptable premise—the most crucial ingredient to describe the equation of state of matter, i.e., the strong interaction, is presently too poorly understood in the range of the matter density involved to enable one to “see” with confidence what actually takes place in ultra‐dense matter. QCD, the fundamental theory of strong interactions, is, to date, unable to access simultaneously both the low‐density regime—nuclear matter—and the non‐asymptotic higher‐density regime—the star core—in a consistent and unified way, neither are there any models in the literature that can be trusted. Presently available are mostly patchwork models, controlled within only a limited range of validity. This present state of matter therefore renders unanswerable the question: What is the fundamental physics involved in the densest “observable” object being stable against gravitational collapse?
In this series, we will have reviews and/or articles on new developments in the endeavor to address this issue by a few invited active researchers in the field coming from different strategies. One should of course ask to what extent the present knowledge on gravity can be taken as an established premise. We will then put focus on a variety of different approaches to the structure of the matter involved, exploiting both phenomenological and field theoretical tools, as well as the variety of efforts to construct—as model‐independently as feaible—the EoS directly from the wealth of observables that will become available from the low‐density to high‐density regimes involved with an emphasis on the future directions to be taken. The key issues will be on the symmetries considered—or assumed—to be consistent with QCD that are either intrinsic or emergent from strong correlations. There will be both bottom‐up and top‐down approaches. The former resorts to effective field theories anchored in chiral symmetry—with or without scale symmetry and hidden local symmetry—of QCD manifested at a low‐energy (density) scale and extrapolated to a high‐energy (density) scale—with or without “hadron‐quark continuity”—by implementing what are taken as the intrinsic QCD degrees of freedom. One of the top‐down approaches starts from where the perturbative QCD is applicable down to where the matching to a chiral EFT at low density becomes indispensable. The other top‐down approach is holographic dual QCD, brought from some non‐asymptotic scale, say, “orange scale,” down to the scale where a chiral EFT is forced upon. We will also present certain generic density‐functional approaches—in either relativistic or non‐relativistic mean‐field approximations—anchored on the Hohenberg–Kohn theorem applied to nuclear physics. These approaches purport to bypass the matching of the low–high scales.
Finally there will be an attempt to access the EoS directly from nuclear and astrophysical data without invoking nuclear models via, e.g., “deep learning” and other algorithms
Prof. Dr. Mannque Rho
Guest Editor
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